Praying by Numbers: An Essay on Medieval Aesthetics

Author(s): Niklaus Largier

Source: Representations, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Fall 2008), pp. 73-91
Published by: University of California Press
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NIKLAUS LARGIER

Praying by Numbers:
An Essay on Medieval Aesthetics

1. “Your asceticism is sublime.” In 1965 Luis Buñuel directed

the film Simón del desierto (Simon of the Desert), which portrays an ascetic who
imitates the example of the fourth-century Saint Simeon Stylites. Standing
for several years and months on a pillar in the desert, Simón practices a
most austere form of self-fashioning, attempting to free himself from all
natural, social, and historical bonds, and staging his existence as an ulti-
mate state of exception within the world (fig. 1). At one point in this short
movie, a visiting monk says to the protagonist: “Your asceticism is sublime.”
Characterizing the acts of Simón as “sublime,” he speaks not only to the
impressive spiritual effort of the one who resides on the pillar absorbed in
prayer but also to the aesthetic quality of Simón’s performance and to its for-
mal perfection. Asceticism, monastic practice, religious life is—as the monk
knows—essentially the imitation of an example in and through the acts of
prayer. It is the formal repetition and the aesthetic emulation of an exem-
plum, which transcends time and history within the very context of the his-
torical world that Buñuel shows us in all its poverty, aridity, and cruelty.
Prayer is the ascetic’s very act of emulation that evokes and realizes the
example of sanctity, that makes its image present in the repetition, and that
evokes an archive of images connected to it. Buñuel’s film is about this repe-
tition of a form, the emulation of the “example of Simeon Stylites,” which, in
turn, is nothing other than the repetition of the archetypal figure of Christ
who exposes himself to the temptations by the devil in the desert—and thus
evokes all the images of diabolic temptation the film plays with (fig. 2).
What Buñuel’s film depicts—rather than narrates—is the mechanical
structure of this production and reproduction of images of holiness that

A B S T R A C T In this essay I argue that the imitation of examples of sainthood in the practice of prayer is
the formal basis of a medieval aesthetics that focuses on the animation and the phenomenology of sen-
sation and emotion. Quoting from this tradition and drawing on the mechanical character of such tech-
niques of animation, nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors and filmmakers—Flaubert, Huysmans,
and Buñuel—explore the aesthetic possibilities of these religious practices. Thus, they recover and illus-
trate a history of the evocation of sensation and emotion through images and texts, which in the
medieval context can be best described as a highly formal art of “praying by numbers.” / R E P R E S E N T A -
T I O N S 104. Fall 2008 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN
1533–855X, pages 73–92. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce
article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.
DOI:10.1525/rep.2008.104.1.73. 73

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FIGURE 1. Luis Buñuel, Simon of the Desert (Simón del desierto). Video still.

FIGURE 2. Buñuel, Simon of the Desert. Video still.

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relies on a tradition of exemplary images that goes far back, obviously

beyond the invention of cinema itself. Many elements in Buñuel’s filmmak-
ing testify to his fascination with this tradition, that is, with the tradition of
imitation and emulation of images of holiness to provide us with a model of
image-making in a more general sense. Simón represents the exemplary imi-
tator in this tradition. The acts of imitation he chooses, his isolation from
the world in full view of it, evoke in turn a doubling of the world and the
production of both images of temptation and holiness. Neither of these
worlds exists prior to the acts of the saint; both take shape only insofar as
they are invoked in the saint’s imitation of a paradigmatic form that chal-
lenges the world and its seemingly natural face in multiple ways. It is the saint
in his acts of prayer—the core of his practice while standing on the pillar—
who produces the series of images that start to infect and occupy the world,
turning him into the lens that makes the historical nature of his surround-
ings—not unlike the world in Hieronymus Bosch’s famous painting the
Temptation of Saint Anthony—emerge as the realm of abject pleasures, evil
seduction, and empty promises.

2. In the case of Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert the underlying textual, his-
torical, imaginary reference is the story not only of the desert father stand-
ing on his pillar, but of another figure, a figure much more potent in the
history of image-making, staging of the body and—in more general terms—
the complicated relationship between control, transgression, temptation,
and the imitation of a formal example. I am speaking of the just-mentioned
figure of Saint Anthony, a saint well known through innumerable represen-
tations of the legendary scene of his temptations while meditating in the
desert. Usually we encounter him as he sits and meditates in the middle of a
scene that includes monsters of all kinds, lascivious creatures, naked women
and men, images of all possible forms of disfiguration and sensuality (fig. 3).
It is this legendary figure that provides us with a script exemplary not of how
the natural world is full of temptation, but of how the everyday world turns
into a world of temptation and of how a formal exercise, a specific frame-
work, a dramatic structure of control and transgression produce this very
scene. Buñuel, who has always been fascinated by the story of Anthony,
makes reference to this tradition when he portrays his modern ascetic in the
form of the exemplary imitator, who in his imitation produces at the same
time the sensual excess of demonic and divine transgression, which chal-
lenge the everyday in similar ways. His immersion in prayer, his absorption
through prayer, engenders the form he embodies, the exemplary form of
the ascetic, which in turn brings an archive of poetic images of the divine
and the diabolic into the world. Prayer, returning to the exemplary figures

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FIGURE 3. Albrecht Dürer,

Temptation of Saint Anthony,
1502/1515. Vienna, Albertina
Museum, Inv. nr. 3143.
D 1161515.

of Anthony and Christ in the desert, repeats these images, enlivens them in
the imagination, and thus informs the perception and the face of the world.

3. Buñuel’s fascination with the desert saint and his evocation of exces-
sive images of divine imploration and sensual temptation has its roots not
just in the surrealist tradition and its use of dream language. Beyond surreal-
ism it points, as I mentioned before, to the fascination of the surrealist and
decadent writers and artists with what we could call the abject forms of Chris-
tian sainthood and their ways of challenging “nature” itself by means of spe-
cific technologies of self-fashioning.1 One of the most influential authors in
this line of thought is Joris-Karl Huysmans, mainly through his novel A
rebours, in English translations with the titles Against the Grain or Against
Nature.2 In his Studien zur Kritik der Moderne, published in 1894, the Viennese
author Hermann Bahr quotes from this novel with an enthusiastic emphasis:
“We have to be able to hallucinate ourselves and to put the dream in place of
reality. In the eyes of Jean Des Esseintes, the artificial was the most remarkable
quality of the human spirit. As he used to say: the time of nature has passed;
the nauseating uniformity of her landscapes and heavens has exhausted the

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patience of the refined spirits.”3 With regard to Jean Des Esseintes, the pro-
tagonist of Against Nature, Bahr quotes Huysmans when he locates his hero
in a “thébaide raffinée, . . . un désert confortable,” thus referring to the very
location, the desert of Thebais, where the ancient desert fathers sought
refuge in an alternative world structured and produced by ascetic practices
and prayer. In the case of Des Esseintes, a wealthy decadent of the nine-
teenth century, this retreat from the world takes shape in a specific form.
Jean moves into an isolated house in the countryside near Paris, and he
makes this house the instrument of an entirely new world of self-fashioning
that relies on the configuration of space, the organization of time, the
choice of the furniture and art, the clothes of the servants, and the prepara-
tion of his meals. Huysmans himself compares this change of lifestyle to the
monk who takes refuge in his cell, removing himself from the world and
allowing for nothing else than an artificial production of states of mind and
intensities of experience within a space that is clearly defined by architecture,
texts, and specific artifacts. This does not mean, however, that the intensity of
exposure to, and the experience of, the world would decrease in this context.
The contrary proves to be true: the simulacre; the production of “living
images”; the artificial evocation of taste, touch, and smell form a sphere of
exploration and education of the senses and passions in a specific way. A way
that specifies sensation as understood not in an everyday form where it is
bound up with the naive empirical and utilitarian perception of things, but
rather in a form that allows for ever-new animations of sensation by artificial
means within specific frameworks.
In Huysmans’s text, this animation takes shape in very concrete forms.
Des Esseintes uses all kinds of tools to create his artificial world: aquariums
with mechanical fish; images that evoke the bridge of a ship; sextants, com-
passes, chronographs; timetables and schedules of intercontinental shipping
routes. Taken together, these things form an indexical, a deictic space that
allows for an experience that removes itself from the world and cultivates an
entirely new world of experiential intensity by means that Huysmans com-
pares to the monk’s use of images, texts, and scriptural quotes in the prac-
tice of prayer. Huysmans writes:

In this manner, without ever leaving his home, he was able to enjoy the rapidly suc-
ceeding, indeed almost simultaneous, sensations of a long voyage; the pleasure of
travel—existing as it largely does only in recollection and almost never in the pre-
sent, at the actual moment when it is taking place—this pleasure he could savor
fully, at his ease, without fatigue or worry, in this cabin whose contrived disorder,
whose transient character and as it were temporary furnishings corresponded
almost exactly with his brief sojourns in it, with the limited time spent on his meals,
and which provided a complete contrast with his study, a permanent, orderly, well-
established room, fitted out for the solid sustainment of a domestic existence.

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Besides, he considered travel to be pointless, believing that the imagination

could easily compensate for the vulgar reality of actual experience. In his view, it
was possible to fulfill those desires reputed to be the most difficult to satisfy in nor-
mal life, by means of a trifling subterfuge, an approximate simulation of the object
of those very desires.4

A little later in the text, this art of animation applies not only to taking a
virtual cruise but also to travels by train and in general to all forms of experi-
ence. Jean Des Esseintes’s artificial world, or better, the experience pro-
duced by the use of artifacts, seems at first to be a world of radical modernity.
It makes use of the most innovative applications of electricity, hydraulics,
and photographic reproduction, emphasizing in a decadent fashion the
obsolete status of nature, and by way of this, of all naturalist literature. How-
ever, the modernist attitude covertly harbors a longue durée, a tradition of the
use of technologies that is to be found in what the text itself hints at when
the house of Jean Des Esseintes is compared to the cell of a monk and the
desert where Simón stands on his pillar. With Maurice Barrès, a contempo-
rary of Huysmans and another favorite of Hermann Bahr, we can follow the
trace of this tradition and of its genuine antinaturalist potential that was
then being rediscovered by the decadent authors. In Un homme libre Barrès
writes, in 1889, “If we knew how to produce the exact circumstances for the
exercise of our faculties, we would be able to observe how our desires and
our soul changes and takes shape. To create these circumstances, we don’t
have to use reason but a mechanical method. We have to surround ourselves
with images—images we put between ourselves and the superfluous world
and which have a strong impact. As soon as we do this, we push our sensa-
tions and emotions from excess to excess.”5

4. What the invocation of sensation in this context of a “mechanical

method” means is thus not a simple return to a so-called sensualist or materi-
alist understanding. It is not the return to “nature,” to an immediate presence,
an ontology, or a psychology of first experience, but rather to a technology of
the production of sensation. In their textual references, both Huysmans and
Barrès—and after them Hermann Bahr and Buñuel—point to a tradition of
prayer and spiritual exercise they want to re-evoke, namely, the techniques of a
“composition of place” (compositio loci) and the “application of the senses”
(applicatio sensuum) that can be found in the writings of the founder of the
Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola.6 In his Spiritual Exercises he writes that these
mental techniques are analogous to “walking, hiking, or running,” and that
they are to be understood as forms of training along the same lines. In
prayer and contemplation, they shape the body and the soul, providing it
ultimately with a new habitus of the perception of the world. Thus, they help

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to produce specific forms of spontaneity, of sensation, of experience, that

have their origin not in nature but in the very practice of the spiritual exer-
cise itself. We misunderstand this technique if we are looking at it in terms of
representation or allegorical figuration of an inner life. Rather, we have to
speak about these exercises in terms of training and production of images
that allow for a creative alienation from everyday life and for the specific
intensity of both sensation and passion. In order to do so, the Ignatian
method relies on a practice that draws images from the Bible and other
exemplary narratives, inserts these images into the practice of prayer, and
produces a state of sensual and affective absorption.
Joris Karl Huysmans’s novel inherits from this Ignatian method both
aspects, the construction of a space (compositio loci) and the stimulation of
the senses (applicatio sensuum). Let me quote just one passage to illustrate
the practice, as Ignatius understands it. He begins with the composition of
place: “Here it will be to see in imagination the length, breadth, and depth
of hell.” Then he proceeds to the application of the senses:

The First Point will be to see with the eyes of the imagination the huge fires and, so
to speak, the souls within the bodies full of fire.
The Second Point. In my imagination I will hear the wailing, the shrieking, the
cries, and the blasphemies against our Lord and all his saints.
The Third Point. By my sense of smell I will perceive the smoke, the sulphur,
the filth, and the rotting things.
The Fourth Point. By my sense of taste I will experience the bitter flavors of
hell: tears, sadness, and the worm of conscience.
The Fifth Point. By my sense of touch, I will feel how the flames touch the souls
and burn them.7

5. The discussion of the significance of sensation in the history of Chris-

tian spirituality focuses often on Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit
order, and his Spiritual Exercises alone. Based on the construction of a mental
space and of the just-mentioned “application of the senses,” the Ignatian
model provides us with a systematic approach to prayer and meditation where
the articulation of the word through artifacts, sensation in general, and emo-
tion play a key role. However, the sixteenth-century Ignatian model was not at
all new. It concludes and systematizes a long tradition of practices that empha-
size the engagement of the senses and emotional arousal in specific ways. To
understand it, we must dwell on the history of this practice for a moment.
The theological tradition I am referring to is centered primarily around
the teaching that the experiential knowledge of God through the word of
the scriptures is not only metaphorically described in terms taken from our
external sense-experience but rather that it is actually based on “five spiri-
tual senses.”8 This tradition fascinates the decadent writers, since it provides

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them with a script for moving against and beyond nature by means of artifi-
cial stimulation of the senses and through the construction of theaters of
affective arousal in the acts of prayer.9
This theory of the five spiritual senses is usually traced back to its origins
in the exegetic practice and theory of Origen, one of the most influential
Greek theologians. Although the inner or spiritual senses correspond to the
five outer senses (in fact they are named in analogous ways), they are not to
be seen as simply analogous or metaphorical. Rather, I want to suggest, the
invention and the rhetoric of the inner or spiritual senses allowed for the cre-
ation of a space of experience, exploration, and amplification of the emo-
tional as well as the sensory life of the soul in prayer and contemplation. I
use these three terms because they refer to three aspects of this theory of an
experience of the world in light of the scriptures: an experiential instead of a
conceptual understanding of the excessive pleasures of the divine and its
“likeness” in things (as well as its opposite, the diabolic and the “unlike-
ness”); the discovery of new and unheard-of states of emotional arousal
against the “aridity” of the soul; and, finally, a technique of excitement—that
is, of an amplification of the sensory and affective life through artificial
means of the articulation of the word in prayer. This amplification includes
the production of feelings of intense desolation, hope and hopelessness as
well as joy, but also of the overwhelming sense-experience of the sweetness
of the divine or the bitterness of hell, and finally of intense desire and exces-
sive love that is often seen in terms of an experience of touch.
Ultimately, what is essentially a theory and practice of prayer and con-
templation attempts to transcend, or, to put it more precisely, inherently
transcends the common and universally emphasized disjunction of “inner”
and “outer” man in medieval spirituality. In my opinion, the dualist under-
standing of inner and outer is misleading since it essentializes two realms
instead of focusing on the aspect of a transformative practice. The move-
ment at stake can be characterized as a denaturalization of the senses—the
transition from the literal and empirical to the spiritual and intentional—
and a reconfiguration (renaturalization), a return to the intensity of sensory
and emotional experience of the world in the form of an aesthetic experience
that is constructed with the help of a specific emphasis on practices of sensa-
tion in the acts of prayer.
I am well aware of the fact that my argument seems to imply an anachro-
nism, since we often hear about the repression of the senses in medieval cul-
ture and theology. However, in light of monastic treatises that emphasize
admiratio and stupor in the face of sensual experience of the world in their
reading of the scriptures,10 we might indeed want to revise this judgment
about the possibility of a medieval prehistory of Nietzsche’s statement about
the aesthetic justification of the world.11

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6. Ultimately, the theory of the inner or spiritual senses is a response to

the desire for experience of the divine in light of the impossibility of under-
standing the divine, that is, of radical negative theology.12 It is in the writings
of early Greek theologians, especially Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, where
we encounter the attempt to define the relation between human and God in
terms not only of an intellectual grasp or of stoic apatheia, that is, of a con-
trolling repression of sensory and emotional arousal, but also of a grasp that
must be described as “sensory.” Using the Greek term aesthesis, Origen
speaks about an experience that transcends the rational and discursive oper-
ations of the intellect. In fact, Origen translates Proverbs 2.5 (King James
Version: “Then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the
knowledge of God”) in a specific way, introducing the term aesthesis, where
other translations, including the Septuagint and the Vulgate, use gnosis or sci-
entia.13 Thus Origen emphasizes not only that the scriptures are the object of
each sense of the soul, such as vision for the eyes, words for the ears, bread
for the taste, tactile sensation for the touch, but also that the experience of
the world in light of the scriptures acquires a new status. Things, we might
say, are no longer seen as things and objects of cognition, but as things that
acquire their experiential qualities within events that have their essence in a
phenomenology of multiple encounters with the scriptures and the world.
In this context, Origen emphasizes that practice and exercise (gymnasía),
that is, the continuous return to the scriptures in prayer, are key to the con-
stitution of these ever-new moments of experience. Two elements are essen-
tial to this practice: first, an intervention that denaturalizes and isolates the
realm of sensation; second, an intervention that recreates it in terms of
intensity by artificial means, for example, the recitation of prayers, the
singing of psalms, the contemplation of images, the meditation of scriptural
verses and scenes.
In the monastic tradition, the tradition quoted by both Huysmans and
Buñuel, the first movement is seen in the gesture that withdraws from the
everyday world and produces a state of exception; the second movement
consists in the introduction of artificial means that allow for the production
of excessive sensuality, that is, rhetorical means, texts, citations, images with
an absorbing quality of arousal. They are the means that allow for the trans-
gression of the everyday—a transgression that goes beyond the “state of
nature” in moments of excessive sensation within the isolation of the cell,
transforming it into a theater of experience. Often, as we know, the quotes
used in prayer and contemplation are drawn from the text and the dramatic
scenario of the Song of Songs; but we could refer to many other instances,
for example the practice of Carthusian monks who use the Genesis narrative
as a blueprint for a mental production of the aesthetic qualities of creation
in the isolation of the cell. I am speaking here of a phenomenology of

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rhetorical effects, since the texts, quotes, images, and music are not only
used to produce moments of sensation and emotion but also to explore the
realm of possible sensual and emotional experience.

7. Let me turn back at this point to the story of Saint Anthony. Again, it is
toward the end of the nineteenth century that we find a broad range of texts
and images fascinated with the temptations of the saint. Among those, Gustave
Flaubert’s La tentation de saint Antoine, published after many revisions in
1874, is certainly the most powerful and significant text. However, it was not
well received by readers when it appeared. Barbey d’Aurevilly thought it
“absolutely incomprehensible”; Flaubert’s friend Renan called it a “masca-
rade.”14 For Huysmans, though, it is the only text by Flaubert worthy of sur-
vival. Finally, Paul Valéry seems to have discovered the significance of the
text for a broader audience, describing it in terms of a “physiology of temp-
tation.” Valéry writes:
It is obvious that all temptation results from things we see or things we imagine and
the effect they have on us when they evoke a sensation of lack. . . . The devil . . . is
nature itself, and temptation is the necessary, evident, and continuous condition of
life itself. We live in a lack of security, through a lack of security, by the lack of secu-
rity. This is the realm of sensuality. . . . What could therefore be more sublime and
poetic than the attempt to put this irreducible constellation on stage.15

Valéry’s remarks end with the observation that Flaubert’s attempt to do this
failed, ultimately, because he was not radical enough, situating the register
of temptations within an encyclopedic repertoire and not in the interiority
of the saint itself. Thus, Valéry concludes, Flaubert’s text ended up being
not much more than a collection of diverse moments and a collage, without
providing, as he points out, a glimpse into the depths of the figure of Saint
Anthony.
I am arguing for a different reading. The moments of collage, the ency-
clopedic texture, the “masquerades” do not have to be understood as a
poetic failure. Rather, they present a very conscious attempt to base the
temptations of Saint Anthony not in a sphere of interiority and in the natu-
ral depth of a historical character but in the superficiality and the formalism
of an encyclopedic repertoire and its aesthetic application. This provides us
with the possibility of seeing the temptation as a practice of masking and
shifting masks, as a rhetorical production of excessive sensuality inspired by
the saint’s lives and the practice of contemplative prayer. The mechanical
nature and artificiality of the text, the most objectionable and despicable
quality of Flaubert’s Tentation in the eyes of many of its critics, can thus be
seen as a strategy that avoids both the depth of interiority and the ten-
dency toward a rationalist naturalization of temptation Valéry seems to

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invoke. In other words, we deal here not with a hermeneutics of innermost

desires nor with a hermeneutics of nature, but rather with a strategy that
allows for an analysis of temptation in terms of a rhetoric of arousal, that is,
in terms of a superficial and artificial animation through a set of formal
moments, means, and masks that originate not in nature but in the cultural
archive and in the encyclopedic repertoire provided by early monastic exem-
plary narratives. Saint Anthony is the one who in prayer returns to the scrip-
tures and to these narratives, who turns away from the world in prayer, and
who thus evokes a world of images drawn from prayer that infects the world
that surrounds him.
Although we might think of Flaubert’s experimental text in terms of
“physiology”—as Valéry suggests—I would rather speak of “phenomenol-
ogy,” that is, a phenomenological exploration of possible sensations and
emotional arousal by the means of a multiplication of the masks and images
that can be found in the history of the hagiography of Saint Anthony since
its elaboration in the Middle Ages. In other words, we are dealing with a phe-
nomenology of rhetorical effects. The fact that—in Paul Valéry’s view—
Flaubert gets lost in a “sea of scriptures, books, and myths” is not only the
specific modern character of this text, as Michel Foucault would like to have
it in his short reading of La tentation de Saint Antoine.16 Rather, Flaubert takes
prayer seriously as the basic ascetic practice of citation, reconfiguration,
insertion, and deletion of texts and images that can be found in the hagio-
graphic tradition itself—a tradition of exercises that, in fact, locates the very
origin of the experience of the saint in the highly formalized practices of
reading the scriptures. If we want to use the term “physiology,” we will have
to keep this in mind, and indeed, it makes sense to use it insofar as in many
saints’ lives the phenomenological exploration of possible states of arousal is
ultimately articulated in terms of a physiology. In other words, the site of
effects is always the body of the saint and the surrounding world. However, it
is never the natural body alone, but rather the body as a site of articulation,
formation, and transformation.

8. In order to understand this phenomenological procedure better we

must remind ourselves that the inspiration for Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint
Anthony came from a painting Flaubert had seen on a trip to Italy in 1845. In
his travel diary, Flaubert notes that he saw Pieter Bruegel’s painting of the
temptation of Saint Anthony and that the impression it made overshadowed
all other memories of his travels.
The painting shows Anthony surrounded by groups of surreal figures of
temptation that can be seen as figurations of the seven deadly sins and seduc-
tive sensuality. We are used to reading this type of painting as a form of alle-
gorical representation, a form of interiority turned outward and made visible

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in and through images. However, based on my earlier discussion of the artifi-

cial stimulation of the senses, we are able to see this in a different light, nei-
ther in terms of an allegorical representation nor in terms of a didactics of
enlightenment about unbridled inner forces, but in terms of an infinite
mechanical production and reproduction of states of sensation and affect
through the ascetic practice of prayer. The exemplary nature of the Tempta-
tion of Saint Anthony is not at all to be understood as a reiteration of a stoic
model of control of overwhelming sensuality and passions. Rather, it presents
us with a site and space where sensuality and passions are configured in a way
that necessarily evokes both the diabolical temptation and the divine trans-
formation, the descent into hell (descensus ad inferos), and the ascent into
heaven (ascensus ad Deum), figuration as imitation and disfiguration of the
world as the basis of the very imitation.17
The basis of this script of dramatic evocation of sensuality and passion is to
be found in the practices I mentioned earlier, in the arousal of an absorbing
intensity of sensation, of sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch. This intensity is
produced by a rhetoric that in the act of prayer draws from the archive of
images and texts, which in turn take shape as the medium for both the world of
diabolical temptation and the world of divine transformation. I am speaking of
a dramatic script because it introduces a moment of irreducible tension into
the model of sensual stimulation discussed earlier. The return to the scriptures
in prayer, that is, the use of citations from the cultural archive for the stimula-
tion of excessive sensation, can in itself never be “pure” and “positive.” It can
only be purified time and again. Thus it must be dramatic; it must go through
the abject position of hell, through the disarticulation of nature and the evoca-
tion of all possibilities of temptation, so that the self-fashioning toward the
divine excess can take place. In other words, the monastic gymnasía, training
and practice, produces a formal aesthetics of evil (of the abject, transgres-
sive, disarticulate bodies) that necessarily joins the aesthetics of the divine.
Both are antinaturalist, since they both depend on a rhetoric of excess that
starts with a state of exception and the arousal through artifacts (although
they can always be, and have often been, naturalized). This is the reason why
Ignatius uses the experience of hell in his Spiritual Exercises, and it is the rea-
son why, for example, Egidius, one of the early companions of Saint Francis,
says that he expects his daily martyrdom when he goes back to his cell in the
evening. Both make reference to the dramatic plot drawn from the life of
Saint Anthony when they discuss the structure of their life of prayer in the
cell. It is the contrary of any stoic scenario of self-discipline insofar as it is
based not on a repression of disorderly desire, sensation, and passion, but
on the active evocation of the disfiguring abyss as the only means that allows
for a transformation of sensation and passion toward a divine excess in the
imitation of the ultimate example, the image of Christ.

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In this training toward the self-fashioning as the other of God, there can
no longer be absolute interiority or exteriority. Instead, we encounter prac-
tices of imitation that allow for the production of certain states of sensation
and emotion. Obviously, in the medieval tradition this imitation is framed by
the ultimate image, the image of the suffering Christ that guides this produc-
tion. At the same time, however, this paradigmatic image and its projection
into historical time throws the monk or the nun in his or her daily practice
back into the imagery of sensual temptation time and again, since this is the
place he or she has to cross without ever being able to leave it behind. The
excess toward the divine thus always bears the trace of the excess of tempta-
tion, as long as we live in time. The effort to produce a world of divine resem-
blance through the repetition of a formal and exemplary model evokes
dissemblance, the emergence of dissimilitude, the disfiguration that chal-
lenges any figuration that attempts to be one with the formal image of salva-
tion. Consequently, the world turns monstrous when Anthony imitates Christ.
The world emerges in its unredeemable historicity, in its radical dissimilitude,
when the saint challenges it in his efforts of ideal figuration.

9. The lives of Buñuel’s Simón and Flaubert’s Anthony are lives of prayer
modeled after the exemplary medieval manuals and ascetic lives. It is in and
through prayer that each gives shape to his life, and that the figure of Simón
becomes the “sublime” aesthetic object it represents in the eyes of others.
Thus, Buñuel refers not only to the historical significance of prayer in the
lives of monks and ascetics but also to the importance of the poetics of prayer
in a specific aesthetic tradition during the Middle Ages. Prayer is intimately
connected with the production of exemplary images, with a formal practice
of figuration and disfiguration, with a mechanical art of engaging the imagi-
nation and the affects. As David of Augsburg puts it in his treatise The Seven
Steps of Prayer, prayer is the very “knocking” on heaven’s doors (quoting the
“knocking at the door” from Matthew 7:7 and Luke 11:9): “When he tells us
to pray, God does not mean that we should tell him with our words what we
wish, since he anyway already knows what we need before we ask him for it.
He rather means that we should knock. Through knocking we experience
how sweet and good he is and thus we love him and join him in love and
become one spirit with him.”18 In other words, prayer is a practice that has—
so to speak—no content, and anything that man believes or hopes for is not
essential to it. Instead, the essence of prayer lies in the act of knocking, the
form of repetitive address that produces an experience through that very
practice. It comes as no surprise, then, that in many medieval mystical and
ascetic treatises and texts the practice of prayer is guided by numbers and
enumeration, making the act of imitation through prayer purely formal. Rel-
evant texts often speak of the “four invocations of god,” the “five-fold praise

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of his power,” the “seven-fold answer of the soul,” and similar orders of invo-
cation. Thus, they construct a formal pattern, a schematic approach that
guides the act of prayer and emphasizes a rhythmical element and a frame-
work devoid of meaning. Simón and Anthony, who both imitate exemplary
models of sanctity, are absorbed in this formal act of repetition, an imitation
of the example through the seemingly endless reiteration of the same act of
prayer, the endless “knocking” mentioned by David.
Often the numbering, the accumulation of prayers and acts of penitence,
have been read and understood in terms of the desire to quantify ascetic
efforts and produce the necessary capital for a personal and universal salva-
tion.19 And indeed, the thought that through the accumulation of prayers
and ascetic acts humans could acquire a trove of grace is one of the impor-
tant aspects of this very practice. This does not, however, explain the charac-
ter and importance of numbers, numbering, and enumeration in texts of
prayer during the Middle Ages. Other explanations of the role of numbers
and numbering in these texts usually refer to “medieval numerology” or to
the “symbolism” of numbers. And again, this does indeed play a role in cer-
tain cases, for example, when the number three refers symbolically to both the
trinity and the three highest faculties of the soul: memory, intellect, and will.
Often, such a symbolic meaning can be found even in cases that are not as
obvious. However, the function of numbers, numbering, and enumeration in
prayer goes beyond both the symbolic and the accumulation of grace. Num-
bering and enumeration acquire a specific role, which is intimately con-
nected with the emergence of images and the absorption through images
presented by Buñuel’s and Flaubert’s examples of practicing saints.
In her book The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Mechthild of Magdeburg
explores the function of numbering in prayer in significant and exemplary
ways. Most of her short texts—prayers, addresses to God, dialogues—contain
numbers. In the first chapter of her book she speaks of “God’s Curse in
Eight Things,” God’s praise “in Ten Things” and “for Five Things,” God’s
caress “in Six Ways,” and the return to God “in Six Ways.” The rhetorical
procedures she relies upon in the manufacturing of her texts are partitio and
enumeratio, which in classical rhetoric serve as a means of introducing a series
of points that will be treated in the course of a discourse. In Mechthild’s text,
however, enumeration does not have an introductory or explanatory func-
tion. Instead, the numbering provides a frame, an underlying formal struc-
ture, which in turn serves to organize a series of scriptural quotes, images,
and other elements of her prayer. Speaking of and to God, she writes under
the heading “God Caresses the Soul in Six Ways”:

You are my softest pillow,

My most lovely bed,

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My most intimate repose,

My deepest longing,
My most sublime glory.
You are an allurement to my godhead,
A thirst for my humanity,
A stream for my burning.

And, she goes on, “The Soul Praises God in Return in Six Ways”:
You are my resplendent mountain,
A feast for my eyes,
A loss of myself,
A tempest in my heart,
A defeat and retreat of my power,
My surest protection.20

Many of the lines and expressions she uses in these and similar texts are
drawn from the scriptures and from her readings of the lives of saints. The
numbering, however, is hers, and it is neither symbolic nor does it intend to
accumulate a reservoir of grace through the numbers of prayers. Instead,
the use of the formal pattern of enumeration allows her to connect ele-
ments, to convey a mechanical order, to produce a metonymical structure
that holds the metaphors together. The order—one, two, three, four, five—
undergirds the images with the formal structure, generating a series, allow-
ing for semantic exploration, permutation, rhetorical amplification, and
the transfiguration of the life of her soul into an imitation of exemplary
scenes that informs her affects and her perception. The contiguity between
the elements she uses, however, does not result from the semantic connec-
tion between these elements. Instead, it lies with the numbering, the enu-
meration alone. It provides the mechanics, the formal pattern, David of
Augsburg’s “knocking,” which in turn allows for the iteration and reitera-
tion of images and words drawn from the exemplary sources she uses. Thus,
she deploys the rhetorical effects of these images and words, their potential
to arouse sensually and emotionally, binding these aesthetic effects through
the abstract framework of praying by numbers and allowing for ever-new
metonymical series of substitution and poetic variations on the ideal of
absorption in prayer.

10. In their return to models of ascetic exercise, both Buñuel and

Flaubert bring the mechanical nature of these practices to our attention.
They point to the radical formalism of medieval ascetic practices and con-
templative prayer, which, I am arguing here, is also at the basis of an impor-
tant aspect of medieval aesthetic experience. Thus, it does not come as a
surprise when Huysmans gives his protagonist, Jean Des Esseintes, books by

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John Ruysbroeck and other medieval spiritual authors to read.21 In this case,
returning to these texts stands not for a return to a “Platonic” aesthetics of
beauty and ugliness, nor primarily to a “Christian” aesthetics of salvation, but
for a rediscovery of medieval practices of figuration and disfiguration that
are inspired by a basic model of formal imitation.22 What we are dealing with
in this model—the very practice of prayer—is thus much more than a ges-
ture of devotion, praise, and submission, or a “real presence of the sacred.”23
It is a formal exercise, a mimetic repetition, and an art of figuration that is
meant to inform the workings of perception, to alienate sensation and emo-
tions from their everydayness, and to immerse them in artificial states that
both negate and reveal the natural and historical face of the world. The
“sublime” of Simón’s asceticism is thus—and I would guess that the monk
who watches his example knows this as well as Buñuel, Flaubert, and
Origen—as demonic as it is divine, as much the production of an aesthetics
of evil and ugliness as it is the production of good and beauty.

Notes

1. Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel (Minneapolis, 2003), 8–18. For a
more comprehensive treatment of some of the points I am discussing in this
essay see Niklaus Largier, Die Kunst des Begehrens: Dekadenz, Sinnlichkeit, Askese
(Munich, 2007).
2. In the early 1960s, Buñuel also wrote a film script based on Joris-Karl Huys-
mans’s novel Là-bas. Cf. Luis Buñuel, Là-bas: Guión cinematográfico de Luis
Buñuel y J.-C. Carrière, basado en la novela homónima de J.-K. Huysmans (Teruel,
1990). For the reception of Huysmans’s works in Spain see 118–20.
3. “Es kommt vor allem auf das Vermögen an, den Geist auf einen einzigen Punkt
zu sammeln, sich selber zu halluciniren und den Traum an die Stelle der Wirk-
lichkeit zu setzen. Das Künstliche erschien dem des Esseintes als das eigentliche
auszeichnende Merkmal des menschlichen Genies. Wie er zu sagen pflegte: die
Zeit der Natur ist vorbei; die ekelhafte Einförmigkeit ihrere Landschaften und
ihrer Himmel hat die aufmerksame Geduld der Raffinirten endlich erschöpft.”
Hermann Bahr, Studien zur Kritik der Moderne (Frankfurt a. M., 1894), 23.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
4. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (New York, 1998),
18–19.
5. Maurice Barrès, Un homme libre, ed. Ida-Marie Frandon (Paris, 1988), 105–6: “Si
nous savions varier avec minutie les circonstances où nous plaçons nos facultés,
nous verrions aussitôt nos désirs (qui ne sont que les besoins de nos facultés)
changer au point que notre âme en paraîtra transformée. Et pour nous créer
ces milieux, il ne s’agit pas d’user de raisonnements mais d’une méthode
mécanique, nous nous envelopperons d’images appropriées, et d’un effet puis-
sant, nous les interposerons entre nôtre âme et le monde extérieur si néfaste.

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Bientôt, sûrs de notre procédé, nous pousserons avec clairvoyance nos émo-
tions d’excès en excès.”
6. For a short comment on Huysmans’s references to Ignatius see the remarks by
Marc Fumaroli, in Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours, ed. Marc Fumaroli (Paris,
1977), 394.
7. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 65–70, in Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exer-
cises and Selected Works, ed. Parmananda Divarkar and Edward J. Malatesta (New
York, 1991), 141.
8. See Niklaus Largier, “Medieval Mysticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion
and Emotion, ed. John Corrigan (Oxford, 2008), 364–79. Mariette Canévet,
“Sens spirituels,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique (Paris, 1989),
13: 598–617. Karl Rahner, “Le début d’une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels
chez Origène,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 13 (1932): 113–45. Karl Rahner,
“La doctrine des ‘sens spirituels’ au Moyen-Age, en particulier chez Bonaven-
ture,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 14 (1933): 263–99. Hans Urs von Balthasar,
Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästhetik (Einsiedeln, 1961), 1: 352–67. Niklaus
Largier, “Inner Senses—Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in Medieval
Mysticism,” in Codierung von Emotionen im Mittelalter/Emotions and Sensibilities in
the Middle Ages, ed. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten (Berlin, 2003), 3–15.
9. See, e.g., William of Saint Thierry, Epistola ad fratres de Monte Dei, ed. Jean
Déchanet (Paris, 2004), 170.
10. See, e.g., Baldwin of Canterbury, Tractatus de duplici resurrectione, in Patrologia
Latina, ed. Jean-Paul Migne (Paris, 1855), 204:429–42.
11. Cf. also Niklaus Largier, “Die Applikation der Sinne: Mittelalterliche Ästhetik
als Phänomenologie rhetorischer Effekte,” in Das fremde Schöne: Dimensionen des
Ästhetischen in der Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. Manuel Braun and Christopher
Young (Berlin, 2007), 43–60.
12. Cf. Albertus Magnus, Commentarii in tertium librum Sententiarum III d. 13 a. 4, in
Opera omnia, ed. Stephanus C. A. Borgnet (Paris, 1894), 28:240.
13. Origenes, Commentarium in Canticum Canticorum II 9, 12, in Origène: Commentaire
sur le Cantique des Cantiques, ed. Luc Brésard, Henri Crouzel, and Marcel Borret
(Paris, 1991), 442.
14. See the introduction by Jacques Suffel in Gustave Flaubert, La tentation de Saint
Antoine, ed. Jacques Suffel (Paris, 1967). A reconstruction of Flaubert’s sources
is provided in Jean Seznec, Nouvelles études sur “La tentation de Saint Antoine”
(Paris, 1949).
15. Paul Valéry, “La tentation de (saint) Flaubert,” in Variété V (Paris, 1982), 205–6:
Flaubert a été comme enivré par l’accessoire aux dépens du principal. Il a subi le
divertissement des décors, des contrastes, des précisions “amusantes” de détails,
cueillis ça et là dans des livres peu ou mal fréquentés: donc, Antoine lui-même
(mais un Antoine qui succombe), il a perdu son âme . . . En ne s’inquiétant pas sur
toute chose d’animer puissamment son héros, il a négligé la substance même de
son thème: il n’a pas entendu l’appel à la profondeur. De quoi s’agissait-il? De rien
de moins que de figurer ce qu’on pourrait nommer la physiologie de la tentation,
toute cette mécanique essentielle dans laquelle les couleurs, les saveurs, le chaud et
le froid, le silence et le bruit, le vrai et le faux, le bien et le mal jouent le rôle de
forces et s’établissent en nous en forme d’antagonismes toujours imminents. Il est
clair que toute “tentation” résulte de l’action de la vue ou de l’idée de quelque
chose qui éveille en nous la sensation qu’elle nous manquait. Elle crée un besoin
qui n’était pas ou qui dormait, et voici que nous sommes modifiés sur un point,

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sollicités dans une de nos facultés, et tout le reste de notre être est eintraîné par
cette partie surexcitée . . . Ce mécanisme est celui de toute nature vive; le Diable,
hélas! est la nature même, et la tentation est la condition la plus évidente, la plus
constante, la plus inéluctable de toute vie. Vivre est à chaque instant manquer de
quelque chose—se modifier pour l’atteindre—et par là, tendre à se replacer dans
l’etat de manquer de quelque chose. Nous vivons de l’instable, par l’instable, dans
l’instable: c’est toute l’affaire de la Sensibilité, qui est le ressort diabolique de la vie
des êtres organisés. Quoi de plus extraordinaire à essayer de concevoir, et que peut-
il y avoir de plus “poétique” à mettre en oeuvre que cette puissance irréductible qui
est tout pour chacun de nous, qui coïncide exactement avec nous-mêmes, qui nous
meut, qui nous parle et se parle en nous, qui se fait plaisir, douleur, besoin, dégoût,
espoir, force ou faiblesse, dispose des valeurs, nous rend anges ou bêtes, selon
l’heure ou le jour? Je songe à la variété, aux intensités, à la versatilité de notre sub-
stance sensible, à ses infinies ressouces virtuelles, à ses innombrables relais, par les
jeux desquels elle se divise contre elle-même, se trompe elle-même, multiplie ses
formes de désir ou de refus, se fait intelligence, langage, symbolismes, qu’elle
développe et combine pour en composer d’étranges mondes abstraits. Je ne doute
pas que Flaubert ait eu conscience de la profondeur de son sujet; mais on dirait
qu’il a eu peur d’y plonger jusqu’à ce point où tout ce qui peut s’apprendre ne
compte plus . . . Il s’est donc égaré dans trop de livres et de mythes; il y a perdu la
pensée stratégique, je veux dire l’unité de sa composition qui ne pouvait résider
que dans un Antoine dont Satan eût été l’une des âmes.

16. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits (Paris, 1994), 1: 293–325: “Ce lieu nouveau des
fantasmes, ce n’est plus la nuit, le sommeil de la raison, le vide incertain ouvert
devant le désir: c’est au contraire la veille, l’attention inlassable, le zèle érudit,
l’attention aux aguets. Le chimérique désormais naît de la surface noire et
blanc des signes imprimés, du volume fermé et poussiéreux qui s’ouvre sur un
envol de mots oubliés; il se déploie soigneusement dans la bibliothèque assour-
die, avec ses colonnes de livres, ses titres alignés et ses rayons qui la ferment de
toutes parts, mais bâillent de l’autre côté sur des mondes impossibles. L’imagi-
naire se loge entre le livre et la lampe. On ne porte plus le fantastique dans son
coeur; on ne l’attend pas non plus des incongruités de la nature; on le puise à
l’exactitude du savoir; sa richesse est en attente dans le document. Pour rêver,
il ne faut pas fermer les yeux, il faut lire. La vraie image est connaissance”
(297).
17. Most medieval manuals of prayer could illustrate this. See William of Saint
Thierry, Epistola, 170: “Hoc enim modo cellarum incolae saepe descendunt ad
infernum. Sicut enim assidue contemplando revisere amant gaudia caelestia,
ut ardentius ea appetant; sic et dolores inferni, ut horreant et refugiant.” Cf.
also Adam of Dryburgh, “Liber de quadripertito exercitio cellae,” in Patrologia
Latina, 153:840. William of Saint-Thierry, Meditativae orationes, ed. Jacques
Hourlier (Paris, 1985), 124, 136.
18. David of Augsburg, Septem gradus orationis, in Jacques Heerinckx, “Le ‘Septem
gradus orationis’ de David d’Augsbourg,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 14
(1933): 161.
19. For a comprehensive study see: Arnold Angenendt, Thomas Braucks, Rolf
Busch, Thomas Lentes, Hubertus Lutterbach, “Gezählte Frömmigkeit,” Früh-
mittelalterliche Studien 29 (1995): 1–71.
20. Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin
(New York, 1998), 48. Often Mechthild’s texts and enumerations challenge the

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reader to ask what exactly the numbers are meant to refer to, thus creating
another level of contemplative engagement with the text.
21. See Huysmans, Against Nature, chap. 12, 115–33, where Ruysbroeck figures
along with Charles Baudelaire.
22. Not surprisingly, the Psychomachia of Prudentius, which forms one of the back-
grounds of Mechthild’s texts, is also part of Des Esseintes’s readings. See Huys-
mans, Against Nature, 30.
23. Cf. the discussion of Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor
dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich, 1990), in Hans Robert Jauss, “Über religiöse
und ästhetische Erfahrung. Zur Debatte um Hans Beltings ‘Bild und Kult’ und
George Steiners ‘Von realer Gegenwart,’” Merkur 45 (1991): 934–46.

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